Not when you can pick up an EOS-M and 22mm F2 for peanuts. The IQ is excellent and it will fit in a smallish pants pocket no problem. Not forgetting that you can buy an adaptor and use all your EF/S lenses on it. Canon also offer many more choices of decent lenses at low prices, for instance I picked up a 55-250mm lens for £109 and I'll take that lens over the m4/3's 40/45-150mm range lenses all day long, it's an amazing lens for the price. Then there's the G1-X, another superb camera for a very reasonable price now, beats any m4/3's camera and kit lens combination by a country mile.There's definitely value in Canon if you know where to look. Like any manufacturer, wait for 9 months to a year and prices drop significantly, be an early adopter and pay through the nose.

Terrible example. The only reason why Canon sells for that price is because they completely flopped and the EOS-M, excuse my language, sucks. Yes, I've used the EOS-M quite a bit. It is my girlfriend's camera. They put a good sensor in that thing and then forgot to actually build a camera around it. The focus is not only slow, it's inaccurate and the MF isn't very good, either. No wonder she reaches for my E-PM2 whenever there's a shot she needs to nail.

That's a matter of opinion of course. There are plenty of EOS-M user not having those problems, myself included, just check in the EOS-M forum. It's easy if you are struggling to focus, you just use the magnify option, not really that hard but most of the time it's no problem, all contrast detect systems struggle at times.

You can't use EOS-M as the example of something that's competitive when the only reason why it sells at the current price is because it's completely flopped and forced to take a 50-60% hit from its original sales price. Now, at $300-400 that you can get it for nowadays, it's actually not the most horrible way you could spend your money. However, had the EOS-M actually been a good camera, it would have stayed expensive.

It's not much different from many CSC camera's who's prices have also nosedived within the year. It also does something that has taken Olympus several years to crack, it also focuses EF lenses pretty decently and accurately.That aside, consider this, Olympus are releasing the E-M1 and it will cost in the region of £1200 at least. Canon have already released the EOS 100D which you can get for a third of the price and it does most of what the E-M1 is reported to do - already. It has the advantages of both mirrorless and mirrored cameras and also has an ovf. It has dual focusing and can take a massive range of lenses as well as the newer STM lenses for video. They're not so dissimilar in many ways and if you're on a budget which one would you buy?

How do you figure the 100D/SL1 has the advantages of a mirrorless camera? It seems to be a cheap and simple DLSR, cut and dry...

It's basically a combination of an EOS-M and DSLR, you get the excellent touch screen focusing and benefits of exposing using liveview and CDAF focusing, but you also get the pdaf focusing and ovf from a DSLR. It has the same LCD as the EOS-M (which is excellent) and an ovf which is as large as a mid range DSLR. To me it seems that the E-M1 is not offering a huge amount more for the price, except perhaps the 5 axis IBIS. The 100D is able to track and focus fast moving objects like other DSLR's and it's also able to have pinpoint accuracy like most CSC's cameras, to me it seems like a great hybrid offering that plenty of people seem to have missed. DPR gave it a gold award for a reason.